Rules For Startup Success

Loic Le Meur’s Ten Rules For Startup Success

Some rules for startup success:

1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea............Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible.
2. Share your idea.......Meet and talk to your competitors.
3. Build a community.........Make sure people hear about you.
4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

Not invented here?

Is the "competitive" advantage of "Innovation" as an intellectual property getting diluted?

In Innovation through Global Collaboration: A New Source of Competitive Advantage, Harvard Business School professor Alan MacCormack and his research collaborators interviewed some 100 managers from 20 firms to gather best practices of the companies that do collaborative innovation correctly.

They discovered that COLLABORATION is becoming a key driver due to product complexity, availability of a low-cost but highly skilled labor pool, and advances in development tools.

Further, collaboration enables shorter development lead times, increasing capacity, and AN ACCESS to skills, capabilities, and intellectual property that a firm does not possess internally.

Of course, this brings unique challenges:

In a case study, more than 200 people from one firm and its three partners were involved in developing software for a new system-on-a-chip design. Initially, all team members had access to the firm’s entire code repository, including much code unrelated to their own work. Then they realized the risk of exposing a thousand person-years of code and changed the system to expose only the IP necessary for each partner to meet its goals.

The 23-page Full Working Paper Text can be downloaded from http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-079.pdf.